Teaching someone how to perform even a simple task can be extremely difficult. For this project, we explored how to explain instructions visually by making a how-to video on an assigned simple task. We had to consider:
• How would you instruct someone to perform the task? What is the story?
• To whom are the instructions important? Who would view the instructions?
• In what context are they important?
• What is important to show in the process? How much detail is needed?
• What is important to exclude in the process? What is irrelevant?
• How long should specific steps last?
• What is important to hear during the process?
• What serves as additional, not just redundant, information?
Additionally, our videos had a number of criteria:
must be 60 seconds or less in length
• must be saved as a .mov or .mp4
• must be 1024 x 768 pixels in size (horizontal)
• may NOT include voice narration or text
• may NOT be edited digitally, other than splicing clips together (thus, you
cannot add sound separately; it must be recorded in the original shooting)
In other words, our video had to be universally understandable. Here is how I made my video about how to lace and tie shoes.
I have been lacing my shoes criss-cross and tying them with “bunny ears” for as long as I can remember. Looking around my classmates’ shoes, it also seems to be the most common way of lacing and tying:
In order to gain a fresh perspective as someone who had never tied a shoe, I learned a new style of lacing: bar laces, and a faster way to tie shoes, Ian’s Knot. This way, it would be easier to understand the confusing parts of lacing and tying as compared to doing it a way that I was familiar with.
I found that learning both lacing and tying were much more difficult than I had expected. Getting the pattern right for the bar laces took at least 3 tries, even with pictures and videos as guides, and another 5+ tries to get familiar with. In addition, the knot was deceptively easy; I could not figure out how to pass my hands through each other for a solid 30 minutes!
Relearning how to lace and tie shoes really put its true difficulty into perspective. The reason we are able to perform “simple” tasks like these so easily is because we practice them everyday, not just because the tasks themselves are simple. In reality, lacing and tying shoes requires keeping track of many small details at once, including which hole and side to insert the laces, which laces goes on top, and which fingers to wrap the laces around when tying. Most people learn to tie shoes as young children; if it took me at least an hour to learn this style of lacing and tying, imagine how long a child would take to learn!
After becoming familiar with bar lacing and Ian’s Knot, I took pictures of each step in lacing and tying shoes to plan out my video. As a rough draft, I placed my shoe on the studio floor and shot major steps of lacing and tying from directly above to show the viewer their perspective when they tie their own shoes.
1st Draft: My first “storyboard” consisted of 12 photos: 7 lacing steps and 4 tying steps (the last picture showed a properly tied shoe). Looking back, there was too much emphasis on lacing the shoes compared to tying them; while lacing was well explained, parts of knot-tying were more ambiguous and could be confusing to the viewer. Additionally, although the gray floor contrasted very well with my red shoe and white laces, I felt like the lacing step could have been easier to explain if one half of the lace was painted a different color (I did not address this in my 2nd draft, but it is visible in the first video clips I recorded).
2nd Draft: I shot this storyboard against the white seamless background to eliminate as much noise as possible and emphasize the shoe. Additionally, I expanded it to 21 images: 1 “materials needed” layout, 9 lacing steps, 10 knot-tying steps, and 1 final result. This time, I felt like I captured more of the nuances of tying knots, especially when strings crossed over one another. Additionally, for this draft I imagined that the viewer was completely clueless, including details like putting on the shoe and how to thread the shoelace into an eyelet. At this stage, I had not painted the laces quite yet.
We printed this storyboard out and glued it into one long strip; everybody in the “lacing and tying shoes” group received critique together on these storyboards. I noticed my classmates trying interesting shots such as:
- pictures depicting an exposition / reason for doing the task (such as tripping on an untied shoelace
- close-up shots of shoe eyelets and laces to help the viewer understand shoes and laces better.
Steve and Stacy noted that compared to the “hemming skirts/pants” group we were critiqued against, the shoelace storyboards were visually clearer due to shoelaces being much thicker than string. In other words, visual clarity would be a huge factor in how comprehensible our videos would be. Additionally, many of us left out “keyshots” that would be important to understanding our tasks, such as how specifically to wrap a lace around to tie a knot. Stacie described this as “our minds working faster than our mouths”.
Steve was intrigued that the field of view changed between my shots (I cropped only the lacing images to just the eyelets because that was the area of focus). This led to a discussion about what much detail was needed to clarify a confusing action, and how the viewer could or could not understand the continuity between steps if the jumps between points of view were too drastic.
Before I set about filming, I colored half of my white shoelace yellow with a marker for clarity. I felt this would help viewers understand my video since the bar lacing pattern is different for each side of the lace. I later purchased colored shoelaces and fused them together for even higher contrast (see later sections).
I wanted to have my foot in the shoe when I was tying for realism, so instead of shooting at the seamless, I taped a piece of cardboard to the ground which helped to make the brighter colors of my shoes / laces pop. Additionally, the cardboard was a flat color which would minimize its presence compared the patterned tiles on the studio floor. The tripod was set to as vertical of an angle as I could make it and slightly tilted towards this “set”. I filmed the shoe horizontally to take up as much of the frame as possible.
When filming, I had to be careful not to let my head enter the frame and block the view of my shoe and distract the viewer. I found that trying to lace and tie a shoe with my head this far back made the steps a bit difficult, and as a result my actions were not as smooth. I also recorded lacing and tying separately to reduce the chance of making a mistake and having to reshoot more often. I managed to film error-free clips of lacing and tying after about 4 tries each.
Editing was done in Adobe Premiere Pro: I mainly used the program to easily resize and move videos around to match the shoe’s position in every clip, since they were repositioned between the lacing and tying section. “Dead spots” in the lacing video — moments that weren’t useful to learning lacing — were cut. For example, picking up and unraveling the shoelace from my first shot took about 10 seconds, all of which were just waiting time, so it made sense to cut that out to skip to the point. I went from about 2:30 minutes of footage down to 1 minute and 15 seconds. A little over half of the video was dedicated to lacing and the rest went towards tying.
During class critique, my peers were able to follow the pacing of the video and most steps were communicated clearly through the video. However, they noted that it could be improved in the following ways (and others):
- Shoe blended in with cardboard backdrop too well (needs more contrast)
- “Cross over” step in Ian’s Knot was confusing to follow (I noticed this among the tutorial videos I watched while learning to tie my shoe as well)
- Horizontal positioning of the shoe within the frame made following the steps more difficult, versus a normal point of view
Additionally, my video did not include sound because I filmed in our noisy studio, so the sound of shoelaces threading through eyelets was masked by people talking. Without the aural feedback of fabric laces, the video seemed to lack emotion, so it became a point of improvement on my next version.
I had a list of goals for my second draft:
- Film against a higher contrast background with a natural point-of-view
- Capture the natural sound of lacing and tying
- Tie shoes more clearly
- Cutting the video under a minute
Film against a higher contrast background with a natural point-of-view:
I painted a sheet of cardboard light purple, which was bright enough to contrast with my dark red shoe, yet dark enough to visually lift the yellow and white laces off the “ground”. I positioned the shoe vertically this time, with the top of the shoe pointing at the bottom of the frame of the camera (the clips were rotated 180 degrees later to keep theme right side up).
Capture the natural sound of tying and lacing:
I filmed in a quiet room outside of studio to minimize background noise and isolate the sounds of lacing and tying. This had the added effect of amplifying other extraneous noises such as breathing or rustling clothing, so I had to lace slower and take more care to avoid making noise.
Tie shoes more clearly:
I slightly changed the way I tie Ian’s Knot to minimize confusion, since the original method I learned involved momentarily pulling one hand’s fingers apart to allow the other to slip its loop through(see the before and after shots below). I learned this method by watching the lacing and tying video made by my classmate Nicole.
Cutting the video under a minute:
Compared to my first draft, I was more judicious about cutting the source clips to reach the time limit. Any moment that did not involve pulling a lace through a hole was cut, since the action of pulling a lace would show which hole and side it was threaded into. As per before, I did not cut any part of tying the shoe because it was not as repetitive as lacing; in other words, each step of tying was completely unique.
My final sequence was about 50 seconds long, 10 under the 1 minute limit, so I decided to add a sequence at the beginning to capture the viewer’s attention. By dropping the shoe and shoelace into the frame, I felt like it was a dynamic way to introduce the materials needed to lace and tie. With this intro added in, the total time came out to about 55 seconds, leaving me another 5 seconds to spare (I didn’t fill this time with anything else).
Compared to my previous video, this one progressed at a far faster pace but felt “crisper” due to the lack of unnecessary actions that I cut out earlier. The background also added a “crafty” vibe to the video and was more visually pleasing than plain cardboard. I showed this video to my other classmates that were also filming lacing and tying, classmates outside of my group, and also to Stacie. They collectively identified shortcomings in this second draft:
- *Introduction “drop” too sudden*
- Did not clearly show location of the shoe’s eyelets
- Pacing too quick
and gave me the following suggestions:
- Emphasize threading lace through hole instead of pulling lace (since that part is difficult)
- Add a concluding shot for continuity or leave shoe on set
- Zoom in for some shots
It was clear that most people did not enjoy the jarring introduction and were confused at the cut without a proper ending. The shoe’s eyelets needed to be more visible to aid in understanding where to thread each lace through as well. However, compared to my first draft it was a marked improvement in clarity and pacing.
From the above list, I eliminated less significant issues and feedback, choosing to focus only on issues that were brought up to me the most. My goals for the final video were:
- Create higher-contrast shoelaces
- Clarify where eyelets are located
- Indicated which eyelet to thread each side of the lace into
- Soften the introduction / materials scene
Create higher-contrast shoelaces
Although my previous pair of white and yellow demonstration shoelaces were bright enough to set them apart from my dark shoes and the two colors differed enough to tell the ends apart, I thought that bumping the contrast up further would help the viewer understand the video.
Therefore, I bought a pack of shoelaces in various colors. To combine them, I cut them in half, and since they were nylon I was able to fuse them together using a lighter. I chose this method over an additive adhesive since the bond would be much stronger and cleaner-looking.
Clarify where eyelets are located:
Since my shoe does not have contrasting metal eyelets that would make indicating their location easy in the video, I had to make my own “eyelets”. These were made using colored two strips of masking tape, one green and one yellow, to correspond with the two colors of laces I used. The tape eyelets held up much better than I expected, and I could remove them after the project and still have normal-looking shoes!
Indicated which eyelet to thread each side of the lace into
Some of my classmates suggested I indicate which eyelet I am about to thread a the shoelace into. To accomplish this, I used the plastic ends of each shoelace and “tapped” on the corresponding eyelet like so:
The flow of my previous video could be described like this:
LACE -> LACE -> LACE ->LACE
whereas the new process would look like this instead:
LACE -> SHOW EYELETS -> LACE -> SHOW EYELETS
The first “showing” step was also a close-up shot of the shoe to make sure the viewer understood what the action meant. The rest were shot at the same overhead point of view.
This unfortunately had the effect of lengthening my video; the 5 seconds I had to spare from my last draft alone were not enough to accommodate this step. Therefore, as I will explain later, had to cut clips very short.
Soften the introduction / materials scene:
In my previous draft, the introduction where I drop a shoe and lace into frame was too jarring and generally not received well. I changed the drop to just placing the shoe and lace down gently, since I still wanted a shot to show the materials needed in an interactive way.
Since I added several shots to the process as mentioned above, I shot each step separately to reduce the number of failed takes I would . As a result of adding them, my raw footage increased to over 4 minutes. To reduce this down to a minute, I had to be even more aggressive with my cuts.
In my 2nd draft, cuts often happened from when my hands entered the frame until they exited the frame. For the final version however, I parts of each step out as well. For example, I would not show the whole duration of me pulling a lace through an eyelet, but only show the second half. I found that although steps weren’t shown in their entirety, it was still understandable from your own intuition filling in the gaps. This saved me a few frames for each step, which when multiplied over every step allowed me to cut a few seconds off the whole video. I also had to cuts new parts of the video; I saved another few seconds by cutting part of the process of slipping my foot in the shoe, since it could be implied that my foot would end up in the shoe anyways.
With this more aggressive style of cutting, I brought the total down to 1 minute flat. I did this without compromising intuitiveness of watching the video and adding additional steps for clarity. My final version also has the best contrast between the background, laces, and shoe and multiple points of view to keep the viewer interested.
Coming into this project, I wasn’t sure why we were even doing this project. After all, aren’t we a design class?
However, as I began storyboarding, filming and editing, I realized that how-to-videos are much harder to make than one would think. Learning a simple skill to the point of mastery, filming in a neutral lit and quiet environment, performing the task in a natural manner, figuring out which parts of clips are necessary to understand the task, designing materials to be intuitive on the first watch, and other steps were all needed to create a how-to-video like mine. In other words, learning a skill can be done by almost anyone, but teaching a skill well can only be done by an expert who understands the perspective of a beginner.
In design, our ideas must also be intuitive, since although we are familiar with our own designs, new users may not be. It is therefore a designer’s job to cater for this group and allow them to get acquainted quickly with a design — whether digital or tangible, and allow users to learn how they can use the full potential of a designer’s work.
